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Another step forward for reporting

At the end of May we released a collection of brand new Aged Reports. Those were the first reports to run on our new reporting infrastructure, and they were a major milestone for Xero, the culmination of a lot of investment and effort. That foundation release has let us build some updated versions of existing reports, with lots of new features and more data.

Depreciation report

The first is the new, and very much improved, Depreciation Schedule report. We have had a lot of feedback on this report over the years and we have taken it all on board. The result is a report which will print in portrait by default, and which can show you the capital gains, losses or depreciation recovered. It allows much more space for the asset names, and if you are reconciling the balance sheet you can now show both opening book value and opening accumulated depreciation. There is lots of new data to play with!

Account Transactions

The second report in this release is a new Account Transactions report. The old report only let you choose one account at a time; the new one loads with a far more friendly experience and lets you choose more than one account.

There are convenience dates to help quickly get the right data on screen and of course all the column reordering, sorting and other features you expect of our new reports is there as well.

Remember that you can update the report template to make it run for the accounts and dates you want by choosing Save > Template so that next time you run the report it goes straight to where you want.

Hey Xero – what about my pet feature?

This is the first release of the new Account Transactions report, but it certainly isn’t the last. We are sticking to a policy where as soon as we have valuable features we will release them, even if we plan to add other features. We know the multi-picker for accounts will be welcomed by so many people, and so we wanted to get it in front of you as soon as we could!This is why the report is not available to users on the the Premium plan yet, but don’t worry, you will see it soon.

So what other features do we have coming up for the Account Transactions report?

Opening and closing balances for the asset, liability and equity account types

Handling the currency revaluation accounts

Showing the tracking information

Running balances for accounts

Powerful filtering options to focus the data quickly to what you are looking for

Tracking filters to limit the data to just individual tracking values

What else are we working on?

The new Profit & Loss report is in the final stages of development. While the report itself looks great, with a clean look and a concerted effort on improving the readability, it isn’t the report itself which makes it sing – it’s the layout editor. The new layout editor is going to be used in so many places, like report packs and report schedules, as well as client level reports. The client level Profit & Loss will be the first place we will release it, but that is another release blog!

In addition to these reports, we’ve delivered a number of other enhancements, including:

Being able to search invoices, bills and credit notes by transaction amount

Enhancements to remittance advices. In our pre-release communications we said we’re going to have a free text field on remittance advices, but that hasn’t made it into this release. We do support the sales tax number and registered address, though. Refer to the release notes for all the details.

A good start but when will we get some basic Customer Sales reports? I have been asking for a long time. All I need is a simple way to view sales by Customer by month. The only option I can see is Income by Contact with no way to filter for only Customers so I get Bank Contacts also included

… In the reports section – especially at month end – would it be possible to get Xero to remember the dates we choose to report on – P&L & B/S as well as Aged Payables / Receivables, to use the month-end dates &
not the end-of-the-following-month dates which is the case once the month rolls over & the dates automatically default to the end of the current / following month…?

Great new depreciation report. It’s nearly good enough to be able to use it to write the fixed asset note. But not quite (sigh). I could not get it to display opening book value (in Xero language that would be opening cost). It still seems to show just cost, which is shown whether or not the item existed at the start of the period.
Would it be possible to add that column?
And could we also tailor the column headings so we can replace Xero’s titles with ones that match accounting language? I know this is not something everyone would like, but I would really love to see that as a feature!
Thank you!

Hi Anita
The opening balances will be added to this report in the near future. As I said, there are a number of features we haven’t completed yet, but there is a huge amount of value there so we are releasing this in phases of work.

@Kevin
I fully agree, customer focused sales reporting is not great in Xero currently, but we will be introducing new reports to fix that. We need a few other framework features built first (grouping by more than one column at a time) but that is very much in the plan and we will get it out as soon as we can.

@Piotr
The new P&L and Balance Sheet will allow you to do just that!

@Jennifer
Hi Jennifer, the Opening Value column should be the opening book value you are looking for, it’s inclusive of accumulated depreciation to that point. Cost is the original cost price. I have linked a screenshot showing a purchase during the period with no Opening Value.https://www.dropbox.com/s/7lwja7alcd3rqrj/DepOpeningValue.png

If you think there are any issues with it, or just feedback in general then please feel free to email me on reporting@xero.com
The renaming of columns is something we will look at in the future but I won’t promise that it will change soon.